Author: Heidi Waterhouse
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What happens in Vegas… costs so much
A couple years ago, I was talking to our A/V consultants, and I asked about their Thanksgiving plans. Oh, he told me, he hadn’t had Thanksgiving in years, because they were already in Las Vegas, setting up and prepping for AWS re:Invent. It was the tentpole of their financial year. It’s the tentpole of a…
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Platform engineering is the tool library of the enterprise
Last year I did a very cute talk about platform engineering through the lens of Animal Crossing, and talked about hospitality, and infrastructure, and what it should feel like to use an internal platform. Today I adjusted the brakes on my bike and trike. It involved significantly less swearing and bleeding than the last time…
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Code standards and my roof
Two (2) months after buying our first house, a giant hailstorm rolled through South Minneapolis, and damaged practically everyone’s roof. This is what homeowner’s insurance is for, so we filed, like everyone within like 2 miles of us. This was the week that the roofers arrived to tear off the old shingles and replace them.…
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Options are not compensation
This is the last business day I could buy my stock options from LaunchDarkly. But I can’t, because I can’t afford to. Oh, I could maybe afford the stocks – my strike price is quite low – I was employee #21. But I would have to be able to afford to pay the taxes on…
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Lady Conference Speaker: AI and presentations
I just got back from 2 weeks across 3 events, and I have a lot of thoughts about how AI* is showing up in conference presentations. * [for these purposes, let’s define “AI” as the umbrella term for LLMs, generative tools, text-to-image generators, automatic prompts and suggestions from tools, and pretty much anything but “intelligence”.…
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Team-led growth and synthetic data
Last week, I talked about making a trial/demo environment that let people imagine how software would work for their team. Today I want to explore what kind of data is useful in a team-product demo. Consider setting Because I’m talking to developers and decision-makers in noisy, chaotic, and distracting environments, I prioritize showing the every…
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Team-Led Growth and Staging
Not that kind of staging. Team-based products are really hard to demo, because they’re hard to see the value of as a single person. If the point of the product is collaboration, standing up a single user account doesn’t really show any of the value. It’s like the difference between touring a completely empty house,…
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Team-led Growth
Product-led growth starts with making individual contributors (often developers) want your software so they campaign to get their manager to purchase it. I mean, there’s a lot of nuance to it, but that’s the basics. Sales-led growth is when you convince someone with a lot of corporate power that your product can solve their problems,…
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The containers of yesterday and the content of today
There are almost no logical places to put a 60-inch tv in a craftsman foursquare house. The house is built for light and air and an era where the home entertainment center was a piano and a victrola. Where meals were eaten at a dining table and gas lighting and coal boilers were the order…
